Simple? Only if you've never played any modern rules-light system. If you're willing to modify the rules as it suits and not take them too seriously then you'll probably have fun whatever you play, but there are much better systems than D&D around nowadays.

How else would you want it? They're supposed to represent a large political party, of course they're going to take the positions of the mainstream of that party. I do see a fairly clear distinction between the moderates (Romney, Gingrich), the conservatives (Santorum, Perry(?), Bachmann, the rest of them), and Ron Paul, and when you only get to vote for one guy and don't get to give a reason, that's probably about as subtle a question as the electorate can meaningfully answer. I would agree that the "conservative" cluster seems much of a muchness and the field could do with thinning down to one in each of those three groups, but that's what these straw polls are for.

I had to borrow an old Nokia a few months ago, and found facebook's java mobile app was stunningly good, better than the android one.

Nope. The Netscape 4 codebase was thrown away because it was terrible, but look how the netscape 6 codebase turned out. If you don't have the skill/discipline/etc. to fix a bad codebase, you won't be able to write a good new one either.

Where are you getting flights that cheap? Seriously, I'd've been to the US (from London) for a weekend already if the tickets I could find weren't 5x that.

I'd point out that the original transformer benchmarks ahead of the galaxy and way ahead of the xoom (don't know about the others). It handles 720p video comfortably (I'd recommend buying Dice Player, it's only #4 to make your #400 tablet much better), so I'm not sure how much benefit you'd actually get from the prime's faster processor - the only time the original gets sluggish (for me) is trying to use it with several torrents running at once in the background.

Will you let someone away with stating something as fact when it has some evidence for it, but more evidence against it? Or, more to the point, is your threshold of acceptable evidence the same for any proposition - so if I see a light in the sky enough times, I can say "it's a satellite, that's a fact" and "it's an alien, that's a fact" with equal validity?

99.9% is an arbitrary figure; my actual level of confidence that this chocolate teapot doesn't exist is higher than that.

You can't disentangle evidence from expectation; evidence is precisely that which causes you to update your expectation (and is meaningless beyond that). If you try to form probability theory without initial expectations, you get paradoxes. So we can only coherently define facts in terms of our final expectations, not the evidence, which is a vanishing intermediate value.

Well, I'm more than 99.9% confident that the aforementioned chocolate teapot doesn't exist - and I suspect you are too. Yet you seem unhappy with calling that a fact.

Do you refuse to state anything as fact, then? I think it's less likely that such a thing exists than that Jefferson wasn't actually the third president, or even that I'm actually a brain in a vat imagining things. If you require absolute certainty to call something a fact, that goes against the common use of the word (and the purpose of language is communication and all that). If you accept that it's reasonable to call our (fallible) observations and inferences about the physical world facts, it seems absurd to say that nonexistence of x isn't a fact when we're 99.9% confident that x doesn't exist, and we call y a fact even though we're only 99% confident that y is true; why is "x doesn't exist" treated differently from "x is blue"?

Given that your genetic "web" grows exponentially, that doesn't actually sound terribly impressive. What proportion of the general population are at least as closely connected as some of the people you mention?

The standard counter to that is: reasonable people would state as fact "there is not a chocolate teapot orbiting the sun at around the same distance as Neptune". It's not that we know anything to imply there isn't, it's that we have no possible reason to imagine such a thing would exist, and no evidence to even suggest it does.

Well, I'm sure I got my money back. I don't know the law well enough to say that every account is covered.

For a regular bank account you get your money back when that happens.

The rise of better android handsets to overtake the iPhone was predicted again and again. And then it happened.

/for myself with the transformer I'm already there

How did you get dvorak? If I could put my transformer keyboard into dvorak my life would be complete.